Podcast: https://bit.ly/48tIwpD
Men: Your wife values something as much as you value sex. Find out what it is and give it to her ALL. THE. TIME! #MarriageTip
That came up in our Twitter rotation on Sunday. (Twitter, Bluesky) It’s a perfect intro to today’s topic. If you want to make your marriage better, you have to give your spouse what THEY want and need. Specifically, you must provide what they find most painfully missing from your relationship.
For a lot of men, and a few women, what is missing is sex. And when sex is what someone feels is missing, pretty much nothing else matters. What’s true for sex is also true for other empty places in our marriage. If it hurts, it has our attention. We can’t ignore it, and we find it difficult to focus on other things. So giving something other than what feels missing does little. It might even make things worse, if it seems you’re wasting time and energy you could use to provide what they are dying to have.
A short list of some of the things that spouses may feel are missing from their marriage:
- Communication. Not a few words, real connections where you share hopes, feelings, and fears.
- Non-sexual physical contact. Not a hug before sex, but long periods of snuggling, walking hand in hand, or sitting together with your arms around each other.
- Praying together. We hear this from women often.
- Help around the house or with the kids. It’s about more than splitting the work load, it’s about being a team.
- Being involved in each other’s hobbies and interests. This need not be doing, but you should listen and ask questions enough to speak intelligently about it.
- Engaging in adventures and fun activities together.
- Mutual friends. And spending time with them.
- Dreaming and planning together.
None of these is unrealistic to want, and none is difficult to do. If you don’t enjoy whatever, work on that. Can you do it because your spouse needs it? Tweak it to find a way you can both enjoy it.
~ This is Paul, and Doing Marriage Well requires meeting your spouse’s wants and needs.
Tilly challenges anything that comes into her hunting ground.
This thing growls loud, but it’s really slow.
Image Credit: © Paul H Byerly created with ideogram.ai & Lori Byerly
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